Irrational Beliefs and Marital Conflict

Abstract

To test the hypothesis that the major irrational evaluative beliefs postulated by Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy are related to marital conflict, 15 married couples participated in a thought-listing procedure. During this procedure, three idiosyncratic scenes portraying marital conflict and three control scenes free of conflict were identified for and presented to each member of the dyad. Analysis indicated that the conflict-portraying scenes were associated with significantly more irrational evaluative beliefs and significantly fewer rational cognitions than the control scenes.